[lostgame]

>> But I absolutely do not get the point in reverse engineering a protocol that has been actively closed off.

You might be in the wrong forum. ;P

I kid obviously - but in all seriousness some people actually do this stuff for fun! And also just to know more about the services we use every day.

[MereInterest]

The fun and the learning, I definitely understand. For me, though, while I don't mind working around technical limitations to develop something, I get immensely frustrated at working around artificial barriers.

[nexuist]

All technical limitations are artificial barriers enforced by humans. Software and hardware doesn't just fall out of the sky.

[MereInterest]

Technical limitations are the result of humans straining in the direction of producing better things, and needing to make tradeoffs by virtue of not yet being gods. I'd put those as distinct from artificial barriers, which are when a product is intentionally worse than it could be (e.g. detect when running in Wine and refuse to run), and was designed to be so.